All Episodes
Previous Next
Nov. 16, 2019 - Real Coffe - Scott Adams
39:16
Episode 727 Scott Adams: A Stone Pardon, The Next Scandal After the Perfect Call, Other Fun Stuff
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hey, if you all checked out your copy of LoserThink, it just made two more bestseller lists.
That's three bestseller lists so far, two more in the Wall Street Journal.
I think it's in the business book bestsellers and the digital book is in the e-book bestsellers.
It's bestselling all over the place.
Like crazy. If you don't have yours, I feel sorry for you.
You know, I think you're here for a little something called the simultaneous step.
It's sweeping the country.
It's the biggest thing ever. And it should be.
Because it's the thing that makes your day amazing.
And it starts like this.
First, you look around your environment.
And you see where you can find a cupper, a mugger, a glass of snifter, stein, jealous, nacre, thermos, flask, canteen, grail, goblet, vessel of any kind.
Fill it with your favorite liquid.
I like coffee. And join me now for the unparalleled pleasure, the dopamine hit of the day, the thing that makes everything better, the simultaneous hip.
Go. Yep.
Yep. Still good. Still good.
Gets better every time.
Alright, let's talk about a few things here.
So, it looks like the perfect phone call scandal is winding down.
I don't know what to call this one.
You want to call it the Ukrainian phone call?
It doesn't really have a name, does it?
This scandal doesn't quite have a catchy name.
Let's call it perfect phone call gate.
He who frames first wins.
So, fact check me here, but does it seem like the Ukraine phone call thing is sort of already done?
Now, I know there will be more hearings and stuff, But doesn't it feel like it's kind of done?
It feels that way to me, because I don't think we're going to get more stuff out of this.
What was the big revelation from the last round of hearings?
That it turns out that President Trump sometimes inappropriately tweets insults at people at the wrong time.
Did anybody see that coming?
Is there anybody here who could have possibly imagined That President Trump would send a public tweet insulting somebody who is testifying at the moment.
Let me say this.
I believe that 100% of the people who have commented on this so far, what we're talking about is that Ambassador Yovanovitch was doing her testifying, and the President was trashing her by tweet while she was testifying.
Shocking. Shocking.
We're all shocked. Now, I think sometimes I feel as though there are only a handful of people in the world who even are understanding what's going on sometimes.
What we're watching is the complete, let's say, collapsing of serious politics and entertainment.
They're no longer separate.
This president has merged entertainment and politics.
Now, before you say, that's a bad idea, he's been doing it for a while and it works really well.
He's the first person smart enough to do it.
Now, other leaders, of course, have put on spectacles.
Let's take the British royal family, where they have a wedding, for example, big spectacle.
So it's very common for governments to put on a show, you know, whether it's the Romans throwing Christians to the lions, whatever it is, you know, military parades.
Leaders put on shows.
This particular leader, President Trump, is basically putting on a wrestling match show every day and people are still treating it like it's not a show.
If you were to look at Trump's tweets through the filter of government, You just say, all right, this is the government I'm watching.
Let's see what the government is doing.
Oh, it looks like the leader of the government sent this tweet.
Let's see what it says. The leader of the government just tweeted some trash talk to somebody who was testifying to Congress while she was testifying to Congress, and she's a good person who served the country loyally for many years.
Because that's the government filter.
Now, let me move you over to the other filter.
You know, the one that's actually happening, not the one that's ridiculous.
Here's the other filter.
Entertainment and government have merged.
We have a president who understands that because he created it.
He's the one who merged the entertainment.
He's the one who puts on the rallies.
He's the one that tweets funny things.
He tweets memes. He's putting on a show.
Was there a better show yesterday than the president tweeting trash talk about the hearings while they were happening?
No. No.
You can pretend to be offended by that all day long.
And I will consider you part of the show.
So all the people who were...
I'm so offended! I'm offended!
Let me fix my lighting here.
I'm so offended.
I do not consider you to be observers who are offended, because you're not.
You're observers. But it's more like you're part of the show.
The thing that people who are offended and commenting on it don't realize Is that they're part of the show?
I'm sorry, you're part of the entertainment.
Literally. I literally consumed your comments as entertainment.
I didn't read it for news, because it doesn't really have any news value that I care about, but I read it.
Why is it that I consumed stories about the people who were terribly offended at the president?
Why was I consuming that at all?
Why did I pay attention?
For knowledge?
Nope. I didn't gain any knowledge.
Nothing I care about.
Was it for entertainment?
Yeah, it was.
It was for entertainment.
I consumed it like entertainment.
Let me ask you, how did you consume it?
The knowledge that people were deeply offended by this tweet.
You consumed it as entertainment.
How was it intended?
It was intended as two things.
It was intended to get your attention.
The president doesn't tweet to be ignored.
The president doesn't do anything to be ignored.
Everything the president does is with a very conscious...
You don't have to be a mind reader to note the obvious.
Everything he does is with the understanding that it's going to be a big public thing.
Of course he wants attention.
Who wouldn't? So, the people who are pretending to be offended and pretending it's the end of the world, you're part of the show.
And apparently I'm the only one to point that out.
So, as I've said to you before, Nearly 100% of the people who pretend to be offended by anything the president does, since the campaign, people have been offended.
I'm so offended.
I'm so offended. If the picture seems frozen to you, you might have to leave and get back in or something.
So, do not treat the people who say they are offended as real offended people.
There's nothing like that going on.
There are people who are pretending to be offended for a fact, and there are people, I think some sincere people, who believe that other people are offended.
Ask yourself if you've ever met somebody who was actually offended by the president.
Probably never. You know, everybody's pretty sure that someone else is offended.
I would never be offended by this because I'm not a small person.
I would not be offended by the sense of humor, the way somebody phrased something on the other side of the world.
It wouldn't offend me, but I'm pretty sure other people are offended.
And so on their behalf, I'm going to be twice as offended as I assume the other people are offended, who, by the way, are not that offended, because they don't care too much.
All right. So I was trying to get ahead of the next news cycle and trying to figure out what the next line of attack will be, because I think we can think past this Ukraine thing.
Do you know what I think kills the Ukraine thing most effectively?
I think what kills it most effectively is the slow realization that all conversations between leaders are kind of a negotiation.
And the slow realization that the public had a legitimate interest in knowing what the president was asking of Ukraine.
He's not the only person who wondered about Joe Biden in Ukraine.
He's not the only person.
We all wanted to know that.
Even the people who were thinking of voting for him, they certainly wanted to know if they were getting a clean candidate.
Of course. Now, the supporters may not have ever asked for it themselves, but you can't say that they don't have a big, big legitimate need to know if their candidate is clean or not.
The same thing with the Russia collusion, except the Russia collusion was a little bit more You know, it was more transparently BS. At least it seemed like that to Trump supporters.
But was there ever any point where you said to yourself, you know, I think the president's surely innocent, but wouldn't it be good that we had an official statement on that?
And then when Mueller came out with his thing and it looked like, okay, there's nothing here Russian-wise anyway, weren't you better off?
As much as you might have hated the Mueller investigation, I think we were better off because we at least eliminated that set of concerns.
Same with Biden. I don't think there's going to be anything there that Biden himself Is, you know, guilty of in terms of a crime, but don't you want to know?
I mean, there's certainly enough there to ask questions.
So I think that this low realization among the public that the president was asking the same questions that we would want to know and that it's pretty normal for people, you know, have leverage and use it.
There's just nothing there.
So that's going to go away. Here's what I think might be the next attack.
This is from a line on CNN's website.
A fateful convergence of events Friday reflected a culture of corruption and intimidation, endemic to the circle of a president who vowed to drain the swamp, but instead became its incarnation.
Now, if I've taught you anything, if you have to use that many big words to make your point, You don't really have a point that the public's going to ever care about.
Even if everything said here is accurate and true, it's irrelevant.
Because if that's the best way you can express it, the public isn't going to get any interest in it.
Let me read it again so you can see how ridiculous it is.
This is using words To try to create something that isn't there, right?
So it's manufacturing something with words.
Now that you know it's manufacturing something out of words, listen to it again.
Events. A fateful convergence of events Friday.
Was it fateful?
Was it a fateful convergence of events?
Or did just stuff happen on Friday?
Already it's ominous.
It's not just stuff that happened.
It's a fateful convergence of events.
Whoa! And that fateful convergence of events on Friday reflected a culture of corruption and intimidation.
A culture, you say.
Can you give me some examples?
No. We're just going to talk about the culture of it.
And apparently it's endemic to the circle of a president who, endemic...
How many people in the United States could pass a vocabulary test in which they could tell you the definition of endemic?
Seriously, what percentage?
10%? So if you have to write in a writing style that the public can't understand, in order to make your point, maybe you don't have a point.
Because one of the things you'll learn is that the more true a point is, at least in the political realm, the more true it is, the easier it is to explain.
If it's this hard to explain it...
Maybe you don't have so much.
All right, so it could be that that's where the next play will be.
The next play, and it looks like maybe somebody's A-B testing it a little bit here.
It looks like the next play is, hey, look at how many people went to jail on the president's team.
And then people will say, well, guilt by association.
If there's so much in the atmosphere...
Some of that atmospheric, endemic, reflected culture of which there's a fateful convergence.
I mean, if you're ever going to be worried about something, you should be worried about the endemic intimidation and corruption of the culture that's part of a fateful convergence.
I mean, if that doesn't scare you, what does?
So that might be the next play.
They might just say, hey, everything about Trump's circle is looking bad, so therefore he must be bad.
Bad, bad, bad, but we don't have any proof of anything the president did.
So that might be next.
Let me ask you this.
So Roger Stone got convicted to, it looks like, 50 years maximum.
I think that might be reduced.
But certainly that's life imprisonment anyway.
You look at it because he's 68 years old.
Do you think Roger Stone should go to prison for his crimes?
Well, nobody's above the law, right?
No one's above the law.
And I think it's probably a matter of fact.
I would accept this is true.
That he was found guilty of lying to Congress and witness tampering.
I don't know the details of the witness tampering, but maybe he talked to somebody, I don't know, did something with a witness.
Now here's the thing.
What was it he was trying to accomplish?
Why would Roger Stone lie to Congress and why would he tamper with any witnesses?
What exactly was he trying to cover up?
Was it his own crime?
No. I don't believe he was trying to cover up for himself.
The accusation is that he was trying to cover up for the President, to protect the President from the Russia collusion accusations, which turned out to be absolute bullshit.
So Roger Stone is going to go to jail forever, and his entire family will be devastated, of course, not to mention, obviously, his own life would be over, for all practical purposes,
for the crime of protecting an innocent president, for the crime of protecting the country from having its president removed from By dirty tricks.
Now, did Roger Stone know that there was nothing there?
Probably. He probably knew there was nothing there.
The insiders probably all knew that.
Did he commit a crime?
According to the jury, apparently, yes.
Do I deny that any of these things were illegal?
I do not. I don't have an independent opinion.
I imagine the legal system does a pretty good job of determining what the facts are.
But if you've got somebody who's going to jail for life for the crime of trying to protect the sitting president from being removed from office by a coup attempt...
Let me say that again.
He's going to be serving life in prison for the crime, essentially, of trying to protect the country...
From losing a legally elected president to a coup attempt.
That's actually what happened.
Have you ever seen a situation that was more conducive to a presidential pardon?
I have not. Except for people who were innocent and were wrongly convicted and literally weren't even there.
So certainly that's the easiest pardon.
The easiest pardon is somebody who was innocent.
And somehow you found out later.
I would think those people would get off anyway without a pardon.
But there must be some that are easier than this.
But the second easiest kind of pardon...
It's somebody who is trying to interfere with a coup.
Interfere with a coup.
That's what Roger Stone did.
Roger Stone, if that's what he was doing, and all evidence suggests, I mean, that's actually the accusation.
So it's not me reading his mind.
The legal system has decided that Roger Stone is guilty of trying to interrupt a coup.
And he's going to jail for life.
Easiest pardon ever.
So easy that I think Trump's going to lose supporters if he doesn't do this pretty quickly.
I don't know when's the right time to do it.
Maybe the legal process has to wrap it up a little bit more so that we know exactly what's going on.
But I suppose the president could do it any time he wanted.
And I can't think of a better time.
Can you think of a better time to pardon Roger Stone than this afternoon?
Think about it.
Can you think of a better time to pardon the guy who just got life imprisonment for trying to stop a coup in the United States than right now?
Right now. If you're waiting for lunch, You waited too long.
And I think every day that Trump goes without pardoning him, Roger Stone we're talking about, I don't think it looks good for the president.
Now obviously the president is going to take the hit simply for being associated with Roger Stone.
The president's already been punished.
The president took his punishment.
Roger Stone is going to jail forever, somebody who's been fairly, I don't know how close they were, but they've known each other for a long time, Roger Stone and the President, and his friend's going to go away for life for trying to stop a coup against the President of the United States.
How about now?
How about pardoning him right now?
By the way, does the president have that full power in this case?
I think he does, right? So, President Trump, I would say that you have no downside.
No downside whatsoever.
In fact, this is just a plus.
If the president pardons Stone for trying to stop a coup, that's just all win.
Because the other side is going to hate him the same no matter what.
It doesn't matter. The Democrats, they're locked in.
But you could lose some Republicans on this.
The President could definitely lose some Republicans if he plays this wrong and not pardoning Stone or even just waiting too long, you know, and letting Stone twist.
I don't get it.
This afternoon is the right time to do it.
This afternoon is the right time to do it.
All right. What else are we talking about?
So Kamala Harris is getting more bad press, of course, for her bad campaign.
And there's some calls for her campaign manager to be fired.
But it turns out that her campaign chair, so the head person of the campaign who isn't Kamala herself, is Kamala's sister.
Now, if Kamala can't fire her own sister...
In the quest to become president, she's not qualified.
If you can't fire your own sister, you can't run against President Trump.
You don't have what it takes.
So Kamala, if you want to show that you have at least a trace of what it takes to be president, prove it.
Fire your sister.
She's obviously the problem.
Obviously. You have the worst campaign anybody ever had.
I've never seen worse.
Not a Republican, not a Democrat, and I mean this.
I'm not being mean.
It's the worst campaign I've ever seen.
And it's your sister who's in charge.
If you can't fire your sister, you should just quit.
If you can't fire your sister, you should get out of the race.
Because you don't even have the most basic capability.
That's just so basic.
If you can't fire somebody close to you that desperately needs to get fired, you don't have the right stuff.
All right. Trump is squeezing South Korea and Japan for more military funding for the US presence in both of those places.
And isn't this one of those situations where you ask yourself, Why did that take so long?
Why were our other presidents not doing exactly this?
Why were we not turning our military into a profit center?
You know, people ask me all the time, Scott, Scott, Scott, sure you're happy about Trump's performance and this or that or this or that.
But what about the debt?
It doesn't matter what he does that's good.
If he runs up the debt, we're all dead.
You know, we're all ruined anyway.
And the debt is going up like crazy.
Is that a good point? Probably.
But remember, national debt is not like personal debt.
So there's some basic differences.
One of the differences, you never have to pay it back.
Personal debt, you have to pay it back.
National debt, if you want to, you could just pay the interest forever and never pay it back.
Because over time, just inflation will reduce the amount of your debt to where, you know, I don't know, 16 trillion or 18 trillion or whatever we're at now.
Seems like an enormous number today, but in 30 years it will seem like, you know, a third of that size, even if you didn't pay anything back.
So a bank would never let you and I never pay back the principal, but the government can.
The government can also print more money and just inflate it away, which has its own problems, but again, that's an option that you and I don't have.
But there's another option that you and I don't have that makes our personal debt different from national debt, and that is that you and I do not have nuclear weapons.
Well, I can only speak for myself.
I personally have no nuclear weapons.
You might have some. And I'm using nuclear weapons as a proxy for the biggest, baddest military of all time.
Now, if you have the biggest, baddest military of all time and you're protecting countries that don't have as much debt because they don't have a big military to support, shouldn't we be charging them?
In what world does it not make sense for us to be charging countries we protect like crazy?
The president is apparently the first person who's figured out that the military should be a profit center.
Because you know what?
The military should be a profit center.
Now, I don't think it should be a profit center in terms of starting a war.
We never want to do that.
That would be the worst kind of military profit center.
It's like, hey, let's start a war to make some profit.
That never works. We want our military to never fight.
That's where the profit comes in.
So our best situation is our military is the best in the world by far.
True. They never fight.
Well, at the moment, there's not a lot of fighting going on.
And other people pay for it.
So that they can be protected by the same umbrella.
It's sort of a perfect world.
I also think we should be working harder to make alliances with countries that are still operating from a shortage mindset.
I've never heard this applied to countries before.
I've heard this applied to people.
So let me give you the most important Mental reframing you've ever seen.
So this is a change the world reframing.
Are you ready for this? I'm going to change the world right now.
Probably. See if you think this is true.
I'm going to say something in the next 60 seconds that could well change the history of the world.
And it's this.
Our foreign relations...
Continue to be in a shortage mindset.
That there's a scarcity.
Yes, there you go. Somebody says in the comments, we manage our foreign relations with a scarcity mindset that used to make sense.
Because in the old days, you didn't have enough stuff.
You had to acquire some resources.
You know, somebody was always going to conquer you for financial gain or military gain, etc.
But all of the old rules, the scarcity rules, don't make any sense anymore.
If the United States and Russia are, like, poking each other with cyber crimes and, you know, little things where you can hurt each other but not start a war, does that make sense?
Does it make sense anymore?
Is Russia really going to poke us with this little bullshit stuff until the United States doesn't have the biggest military anymore?
I don't think so.
And I think the message that Trump has been bringing to these various frenemies and nemeses, I think he's bringing them an abundance mindset, which he doesn't use in those words, but he says North Korea Why don't you let us make you rich?
Nobody's ever said that before.
There's a reason that Kim Jong-un writes love letters to Trump and yet he wants to beat Joe Biden to death with a stick, according to recent communication down in North Korea.
They love President Trump and they want to beat Joe Biden to death with a stick before it's too late.
They actually said that.
What's the difference? Probably the difference is that Biden is in a scarcity mindset and he's competition.
Trump is very clearly an abundance mindset where he's saying, hey, I've got an idea.
Why don't we both do something that's better for both of us?
How about we be friends?
I'll spend a lot less money trying to protect myself from you.
You'll make a bunch of money because we'll invest in you.
How about we just make more stuff and then we all got everything we want?
How about abundance?
So, the same thing for Russia.
Can you give me one good reason why Russia wants the United States as an enemy?
Why? Why?
I would love to see anybody explain to me in any rational way how Russia would get an actual advantage that makes some difference to them in the real world.
I can see lots of things that will hurt them.
If they poke us and it's enough for us to notice...
You know, if they poke us and we don't notice, I suppose, you could argue there's some advantage there.
But we always notice.
We catch them when they hack.
We catch them if they try to interfere with the election.
We certainly know if they're marching into Crimea.
We certainly know what they're doing with everything else.
So the days of poking each other and having a, you know, a scarcity mindset where if we have to get this stuff before you do, It's just ancient thinking.
And when the president says we should be friends with Russia, the way you should read that is not the old mindset, which is, my God, you fool.
Don't you know the Russians are a big enemy and we're competing with them for this and that?
The president, without using these words, is in an abundance mindset.
It's the thing that is his most basic personality element.
You can see it in everything he does.
Indeed, he learned from the power of positive thinking.
Remember, his, I forget if it's a pastor or minister, I always forget which the name is, preacher, pastor, minister, when he was a kid, was Norman Vincent Peale.
Who was really the, I don't know, the grandfather of the abundance mindset.
He didn't phrase it that way, I don't think.
But he did talk about the power of positive thinking and you can go out and just make good stuff happen.
Somebody says pastor. Maybe pastor is the right word.
But Trump is bringing that to the international realm at exactly the time that you should do that.
Because we are at a time when cooperating is a really big advantage and being enemies doesn't help either side.
Tell me which side has benefited by being in a war lately.
I mean, really benefited.
Even the winners of the wars end up with just debt.
They end up with more they have to protect and more poor people they have to feed.
It just doesn't seem to work.
All right, so we should work out something with Russia where we just say, you know, let's get back to, let's get to an abundance mindset and everybody wins.
All right. What else is going on?
Yes, actually, a good point.
Somebody says that Jared was making that same pitch for Middle East peace.
I think in the Middle East you've got a different thing going on.
The abundance mindset is good everywhere, but with the Middle East you've got religious, you know, concerns that you don't have with Russia.
The reason that it just makes me crazy that we can't work something out with Russia is that we don't have an ethnic problem with them either way, and we don't have a religious problem with Russia either way.
So if we can't work out something with Russia, I don't feel like we've tried hard enough, because it seems like that should be the easiest, abundant situation where we say, look, China might still be a problem, but hey, Putin, can we just make more money for each other?
Can we just make this work?
All right. Would you like to hear more stories?
About LoserThink. I know you do.
Come on! You know you do.
So, I'm at that fun part of the process where, as I mentioned, LoserThink made the bestseller list.
I made three different bestseller lists this first week.
Now, what might happen is that because you do a lot of publicity the first week, the second week it might go down a little bit.
Until word of mouth kicks in.
So this is one of those word of mouth books.
So you should expect that the real fun is next week, the week after this one.
That's when we'll know if word of mouth has kicked in.
Somebody says the New York Times, there's some leak about the Uyghurs.
I don't see any chance we're going to have a comprehensive trade deal with China, do you?
I think China's just got too many issues.
And as long as their top fentanyl dealer is still walking free, and apparently he is, I don't see we'll have any kind of trade deal.
Somebody says they bought seven copies of LoserThink.
Wow. So Loser Think is on the following bestsellers.
It's on the New York Times self-help list, number five, which is a great place to be, by the way.
That's a list everybody would drool to be on, because if you get on the self-help list, you can sometimes stay on there for decades.
That's the one you want to be on.
But the Wall Street Journal also has a top 10 for digital business books and a top 10 for books in general.
I think digital books, non-fiction books, and then it's also a top 10 for business books.
Is it in the airport? It is.
It is in the airports and should be in the window at Barnes& Noble.
If you go by Barnes& Noble, you should see it in the window.
Will anti-Trumpers like losers think?
Yes. Yeah.
Now, my book before this, you sort of had to be either a Trump supporter or at least not hate him too much in order to read the content of the book, which was about persuasion.
But because it talked about Trump a lot, you'd sort of need to be a Trump supporter to love that book.
But this latest one goes right down the middle.
So I talk about some topics on the left, some topics on the right, and I apply the loser think filter to both, and nobody comes out perfectly here.
So I really did put an effort into taking it right down the middle on this one, because I didn't want people to miss the book thinking there was a political bias in it.
I don't think you'll find it.
Swalwell appears a lot for some reason.
Yeah, for some reason.
I wonder what that reason could be.
Yeah, my representative in this area, Eric Swalwell, who, full disclosure a few times, he's a perfect example for some of the material in the book.
All right. It's personal improvement.
Yeah, it is a personal improvement book.
All right. I used to defend Swalwell.
I don't remember exactly what that was, but...
Yeah, we talked about Roger Stone.
Alright, that's all for now.
I don't have anything else left.
I love talking to you guys every morning.
I gotta tell you, this is always fun for me.
So, goodbye for now.
▲
Export Selection